Spam emails are sometimes hard to identify and can appear to originate from within UVA. In order to prevent downloading a computer virus or compromising your personal data, please read the below tips on identifying spam emails.
How to Identify Spam
Spam emails can appear to be from someone at UVA or even from Information Technology at UVA, so it's important to double check any email that has attachments or asks you to click on links.
Spam emails may appear to be from a familiar contact, but the email address will not be a legitimate UVA address. Check to see what the email address is, rather than only looking at the sender's name. Sender names can be easily faked, but email addresses are much harder to fake. For example, a scam email impersonating the Chair of our department went around in Spring of 2019. The sender name read "Karen Parshall" but the email address was a Gmail account ("hzhou0354"). See the screenshot below, where the highlighted portion shows the difference between the sender's name and the actual email address.
If you notice an unfamiliar, non-UVA email address, then the email could be spam.
Additionally, spam emails sometimes include images to make them look more convincing. Again, double check the email address!
What to Do if You Receive Spam
If you receive spam emails from someone pretending to be from UVA that ask for personal information or ask you to click on links, the email needs to be reported to ITS.
- First, DO NOT click any links in a spam message. Do not click "unsubscribe" or any other link.
- Do not download any attachments.
- Do not respond to the message.
- Report the email to abuse@virginia.edu
- After you report the email message, delete it.
If you receive spam emails that are not from UVA and do not ask for personal information or for you to click links, delete the message. These messages do not need to reported to ITS.
For more information security tips and information, please see UVA Information Security.